Films and Feelings

    This being a blog about film, I generally keep my observations focused on movies, but today we're going to expand the menu just a little.      Most of the stuff I write here, I write with some film music playing in the background, usually a film score or a Broadway cast recording (right now I'm on a bit of a Raul Esparza kick, everyone deserves to hear his rendition of "Come to Your Senses" from this year's Miscast concert). I've been doing this for a while, yet I only recently had the idea to actually write about some of the songs that inform my writing process. The songs I can never get out of my head.     To keep things mostly on-brand, I'm going to be writing about music that features in films, preferably songs written for their respective movies.  Just to make things interesting (and to keep the door open for a future installment ... maybe ) I'm choosing to restrict the songs listed here to those written for non-musical films, and I'm choo

      The people living through the horror films deserve our sympathies. In most cases, they didn't ask to be put through this nightmare. It's us, the viewers, who are the fools. We knew fully well what we were getting into when we bought that ticket.     I had this thought watching Jordan Peele's Nope on the big screen today. I don't necessarily know if it's true , especially since sometimes the characters in these kinds of films can knowingly get themselves into some hairy situations, but it was a sobering thought nonetheless.     In the case of this film, the protagonists definitely seemed to know what they were getting themselves into. When a mysterious entity starts stealing their family's horses in the middle of the night, brother and sister, OJ and Emerald Haywood, are quick to realize their valley is playing host to an extraterrestrial visitor. Their first reaction? Let's get this thing on camera and sell the footage to Oprah.     The elements at pl

  The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become such an indestructible force of nature that it’s difficult to imagine that the whole ordeal was a massive crapshoot.                     The biggest conceit of the MCU has been its ability to straddle a thousand different heroes—each with their own stories, casts, and universes—into one cohesive whole. It’s a balancing act like nothing that’s ever been attempted before in the hundred years of filmmaking. A lot of the brand’s success can be attributed to the way that each individual story adheres to the rules of its own specific universe. The Captain America movies serve a different purpose than the Spiderman movies, and all the movies in the Captain America trilogy have to feel like they belong together.        Embedded in this discussion is the question of individual directorship within the MCU. In a network of films that all exist to set up other films, how much creative authority does the director of any one of these films actually hav